The Boule ICO is trying to raise funds to do "tamper proof elections"

This is not investment advice. This is my educated opinion on Boule. Take this content as the opinion of a stranger on the Internet and with all of my posts do your own due diligence and make your own decision.

First I will say the Boulé ICO is interesting. Having spent a few years studying this I will say also that it is going to be very difficult to accomplish (a lot more difficult than most development teams realize). There was once a project called FollowMyVote which in my opinion underestimated the level of difficulty involved in doing elections. That said, in the long term I do think we can slowly upgrade election technology to utilize more digital and futurist technology but there in my opinion has to be an approach toward hybridization rather than replacement. The paper system has known risks while the digital system has unknown risks.

In the recent election those who study these matters have accused outside forces (likely backed by a state entity) of trying to influence the election. It is in my opinion that any election anywhere but most certainly in a developed country is going to have to deal with attempts by foreign forces to corrupt, disrupt, and influence the outcome. In fact the NSA has the mandate to break codes and the equivalent of an NSA surely exists in other nations besides the United States. For this reason the over reliance on digital technology could open up an attack surface for cyber warriors.

While I'm optimistic in the long term that blockchain technology eventually will become useful for elections I do not think at the current state it can be built. The best hope would be for quantum communication to enable some of these possibilities but currently that is not yet implemented and is only in the research phase. Coercion resistant voting is hard and may even be technically impossible but I think we should at least try these new approaches on the small scale such as local neighborhood or city level to let these new approaches prove themselves before even considering national scale elections. If this technology truly is useful then plenty of people, organizations, and small scale use cases exist.

Just last month, the state of Virginia in the United States de-certified all their touchscreen voting machines because cybersecurity experts came to the sobering conclusion that the machines were too “vulnerable to manipulation by hackers.”

At the same time the cybersecurity community is extremely conservative and as far as I know has not reviewed at all the new blockchain based approaches or the latest cryptography such as zero knowledge proofs and secure multiparty computation. Of course these approaches can be hacked by espionage approaches because any source code has to run in some computer where the hardware itself could have been compromised or compiled in a compiler which may be compromised. So even if you know with mathematical certainty (probability) that it cannot be broken brute force there are many side channels and other vunlerabilities.

Based on what I see from this ICO and based on my knowledge on the subject I would not invest money in this ICO. It's far fetched as a goal and will require tens of billions not hundreds of millions. Finally it's not achievable on any currently built crypto platform such as Ethereum (smart contracts and Solidity are not secure enough) or even Steemit as Graphene while based on good libraries and approaches like Boost is also not secure enough for something like this.

References

1. https://www.cryptoanalyst.co/2017/10/19/boule-ico-tamper-proof-elections/